<SPAN name="VII"></SPAN>
<h2>VII</h2>
<h2><b>BROWNING: THE POET OF LOVE</b></h2>
<br/>
<p>Browning's reputation has not yet risen again beyond a half-tide.
The
fact that two books about him were published during the war, however,
suggests that there is a revival of interest in his work. It would have
been surprising if this had not been so. He is one of the poets who
inspire confidence at a time when all the devils are loosed out of
Hell.
Browning was the great challenger of the multitude of devils. He did
not
achieve his optimism by ignoring Satan, but by defying him. His courage
was not merely of the stomach, but of the daring imagination. There is
no more detestable sign of literary humbug than the pretence that
Browning was an optimist simply because he did not experience sorrow
and
indigestion as other people do. I do not mean to deny that he, enjoyed
good health. As Professor Phelps, of Yale, says in a recent book,
<i>Robert Browning: How to Know Him:—</i></p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>He had a truly wonderful digestion: it was his firm belief that one
should eat only what one really enjoyed, desire being the infallible
sign that the food was healthful. "My father was a man of <i>bonne
fourchette</i>," said Barett Browning to me "he was not very fond of
meat, but liked all kinds of Italian dishes, especially with rich
sauces. He always ate freely of rich and delicate things. He would make
a whole meal off mayonnaise."</p>
</div>
<p>Upon which the American professor comments with ingenuous humour of
a
kind rare in professors in this hemisphere:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist of
the century, used to eat pie for breakfast.</p>
</div>
<p>The man who does not suffer from pie will hardly suffer from
pessimism;
but, as Professor Phelps insists, Browning faced greater terrors than
pie for breakfast, and his philosophy did not flinch. There was no
other
English writer of the nineteenth century who to the same degree made
all
human experiences his own. His is poems are not poems about little
children who win good-conduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies of
life, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They range
through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of
Dostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, the
traitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by side
with the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every sort of
rogue here half-way between good and evil, and every sort of half-hero
who is either worse than his virtue or better than his sins. Nowhere
else in English poetry outside the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer is
there such a varied and humorous gallery of portraits. Landor's often
quoted comparison of Browning with Chaucer is a piece of perfect and
essential criticism:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span class="i6">Since Chaucer was alive and hale,<br/>
</span><span>No man hath walked along our roads with step<br/>
</span><span>So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue<br/>
</span><span>So varied in discourse.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>For Browning was a portrait-painter by genius and a philosopher only
by
accident. He was a historian even more than a moralist. He was born
with
a passion for living in other people's experiences. So impartially and
eagerly did he make himself a voice of the evil as well as the good in
human nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as to
whether he can have led so reputable a life as the biographers make one
believe. To speculate in this manner, however, is to blunder into
forgetfulness of Browning's own answer, in <i>How it Strikes a
Contemporary</i>, to all such calumnies on poets.</p>
<p>Of all the fields of human experience, it was love into which the
imagination of Browning most fully entered. It may seem an obvious
thing
to say about almost any poet, but Browning differed from other poets in
being able to express, not only the love of his own heart, but the love
of the hearts of all sorts of people. He dramatized every kind of love
from the spiritual to the sensual. One might say of him that there
never
was another poet in whom there was so much of the obsession of love and
so little of the obsession of sex. Love was for him the crisis and test
of a man's life. The disreputable lover has his say in Browning's
monologues no less than Count Gismond. Porphyria's lover, mad and a
murderer, lives in our imaginations as brightly as the idealistic lover
of Cristina.</p>
<p>The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the
varieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immense
possibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say that
Browning, the inventor of this amazingly fine form, was indifferent to
form has always seemed to me the extreme of stupidity. At the same
time,
its very newness puzzles many readers, even to-day. Some people cannot
read Browning without note or comment, because they are unable to throw
themselves imaginatively into the "I" of each new poem. Our artistic
sense is as yet so little developed that many persons are appalled by
the energy of imagination which is demanded of them before they are
reborn, as it were, into the setting of his dramatic studies. Professor
Phelps's book should be of especial service to such readers, because it
will train them in the right method of approach to Browning's best
work.
It is a very admirable essay in popular literary interpretation. One is
astonished by its insight even more than by its recurrent banality.
There are sentences that will make the fastidious shrink, such as:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>The commercial worth of <i>Pauline</i> was exactly zero.</p>
</div>
<p>And:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>Their (the Brownings') love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion
that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of
Heloise and Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and Virginia.</p>
</div>
<p>And, again, in the story of the circumstances that led to Browning's
death:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>In order to prove to his son that nothing was the matter with him,
he ran rapidly up three flights of stairs, the son vainly trying to
restrain him. Nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly of
aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic advice.</p>
</div>
<p>Even the interpretations of the poems sometimes take one's breath
away,
as when, discussing <i>The Lost Mistress</i>, Professor Phelps
observes that
the lover:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>instead of thinking of his own misery ... endeavours to make the
awkward situation easier for the girl by small talk about the sparrows
and the leaf-buds.</p>
</div>
<p>When one has marvelled one's fill at the professor's phrases and
misunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has
written what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning in
existence.</p>
<p>Professor Phelps's book is one of those rare essays in popular
criticism
which will introduce an average reader to a world of new excitements.
One of its chief virtues is that it is an anthology as well as a
commentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning
quoted in the body of the book. And these include, not merely short
poems like <i>Meeting at Night</i>, but long poems, such as <i>Andrea
del
Sarto, Caliban on Setebos</i>, and <i>Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came.</i>
This is the right kind of introduction to a great author. The poet is
allowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter.</p>
<p>At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full <i>Transcendentalism</i>
and
<i>How it Strikes a Contemporary</i> as Browning's confession of his
aims as
an artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic assertion
that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with
things—with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples have
written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a
philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling
of an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the
passion
for the detailed and the concrete. In <i>Transcendentalism</i> he bids
a
younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob
Boehme with his subtle meanings:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,<br/>
</span><span>John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of "things"
as
compared with the philosopher of "thoughts":—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,<br/>
</span><span>And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,<br/>
</span><span>Over us, under, round us every side,<br/>
</span><span>Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs<br/>
</span><span>And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all—<br/>
</span><span>Buries us with a glory, young once more,<br/>
</span><span>Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is
the
splendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and
pedestrian details with beauty.</p>
<p>The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a
great
painter as well as a, great humorist and realist, we shall have read
him
in vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth,
as
when the mourners are made to say in <i>A Grammarian's Funeral</i>:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Look out if yonder be not day again.<br/>
</span><span>Rimming the rock-row!<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the
mourners
had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And
yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he
uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may
often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the
poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden
river.
His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in
smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of
Pegasus.</p>
<p>We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an
exalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who,
echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense of
the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half
of his poems. <i>Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came</i> is a fable
of life
triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile
thing—a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish
hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's
genius, one has only to read <i>Childe Roland</i> again to restore
one's
faith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid
which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail is
added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress
of
all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of
apprehension and the Tower itself appears:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>The round squat tower, blind as the fool's
heart.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the
verses
that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Not see? because of night perhaps?—why, day<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Came back again for that! before it left,<br/>
</span><span>The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:<br/>
</span><span class="i2">The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay<br/>
</span><span>Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay—<br/>
</span><span class="i2">"Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!"<br/>
</span></div>
<div class="stanza"><span>Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Of all the lost adventurers my peers—<br/>
</span><span>How such a one was strong, and such was bold,<br/>
</span><span>And such was fortunate, yet each of old<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.<br/>
</span></div>
<div class="stanza"><span>There they stood, ranged along the hillside,
met<br/>
</span><span class="i2">To view the last of me, a living frame<br/>
</span><span class="i2">For one more picture! in a sheet of flame<br/>
</span><span>I saw them and I knew them all. And yet<br/>
</span><span>Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.<br/>
</span><span class="i2">And
blew. "<i>Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower
came</i>."<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and
triumphant
music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expression
of the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language.</p>
<p>To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme
against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with
words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in
what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he
believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised
for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine attitude
like Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said,
on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered "No," when in his
later years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance was
the defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy
Ghost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians.
Like the Pope in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, he loathed the
association of
Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his
respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see
his
hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual
things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in
<i>Apparent Failure</i> than towards the vacillating and respectable
lovers
in <i>The Statue and the Bust.</i> There was at least a hint of
heroism in
the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests,
as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age.
Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those
two great energies of the spirit—love and heroism. For, though his work
is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative
expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the
poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days;
with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the
most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not
take
this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning
did.
The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too
lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through the
eyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than an
interlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It may
be that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid
him
aside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturally
into the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it
seems
to me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world will
always do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such as
those through which it has but recently passed.</p>
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